Honestly I’m just really hoping that posting this will force me to actually do it.

Don’t get me wrong, Lightbox is great, but it’s current ubiquity diminishes my portfolio’s uniqueness. And for a site that’s meant to win the hearts of clients, that really won’t do. So now what?

Well, first, the dilemmas.

Clicking vs. Scrolling
Right now, I’m in sort of a middle ground. Each family of thumbnails fits quit comfortably on most modern displays, with scrolling required to travel from section to section, and full size images viewable by either clicking on each thumbnail or clicking one thumbnail in a family and cycling through via Lightbox. I’d like to move more towards one or the other to simplify navigation. Given the current layout’s relatively narrow width³, I’m inclined to go with scrolling. Ok, let’s do that. First problem solved.

Diversity vs. Focus
Unfortunately, the majority of the pieces shown in my portfolio are either outdated (the oldest thing on there was designed four years ago) or irrelevant to my working goals. Nine out of twenty total pieces are illustrations, and let’s be honest, illustration is a hobby for me, not a profession. Almost everything I have in the Design section was either done for school or as a personal exercise. Since web design is the profession I’ve decided to stick to, I need to cut back on the presence of both my illustration work and non-web related design work. Ideally, I should probably allow my web work to stand on its own, but I don’t think I’ve done enough to cut the other sections completely.

Content vs. Brevity
How much of a single piece should I show? Web design, particularly of the dynamic variety, is difficult to represent in one or two screenshots. The obvious answer seems to be a simple live link, but if the design ever changes after I’ve moved on, it becomes useless, although I suppose if a site I’ve worked on gets redesigned, it probably shouldn’t be something I keep in my portfolio anyway. So maybe a screenshot or two accompanied by a good description and a live link isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Ok, let’s do this⁴.

Thanks, Wordpress.

I knew we had something special.

Our Art 322 final project. We repurposed plastic grocery bags for a typographic installation. We also tripped on stuff a lot.

The original idea was to take used plastic bags and create hollow, airtight letterforms out of them and float them up to the ceiling of the University at Buffalo’s Center for the Arts. There were, however, three problems with this. First and foremost was the fact that the fifty-three double ply bags we initially ironed together were two heavy to float, and weren’t airtight anyway. Second, we were informed, literally an hour before we were about to launch our now-balloon-powered sculpture, that sensors would set off an alarm if it touched the ceiling. Without having a ceiling to rest up against, the unevenly distributed helium distorted the letters which were now simply tethered to chairs with fishing wire. And third, after finally arriving at a passable solution, someone came along and told us that using helium in our building was against “regulations.” So overall, this really didn’t turn out a whole lot like how we intended. But for a few hours, we managed to transform the CFA into a less rigid and sterile place, and that was good enough for me.

Cover of Virtual Insanity by Michael Gum.

Facebook link here.

abulia \uh-BOO-lee-uh; uh-BYOO-\, noun:
Loss or impairment of the ability to act or to make decisions.

pugnacious \puhg-NAY-shuhs\, adjective:
Inclined to fight; combative; quarrelsome.

(It’s supposed to be World War I style trenches)

bellwether \BEL-weth-uhr\, noun:
A leader of a movement or activity; also, a leading indicator of future trends.

deus ex machina \DAY-uhs-eks-MAH-kuh-nuh; -nah; -MAK-uh-nuh\, noun:
1. In ancient Greek and Roman drama, a god introduced by means of a crane to unravel and resolve the plot.
2. Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an apparently insoluble difficulty.